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Small tips that make a big difference.

Given that you will probably be glancing every now and then at how your competitors are doing anyway – it’s difficult to resist checking whether they are ranking higher or lower than you for a particular keyword – it makes sense to know how to undertake a more formal analysis of their search engine optimisation (SEO).

It’s worth remembering that while simply copying your rivals’ approach to SEO is not a fast ticket to success – after all, you’ll need to figure out the best ways to beat them, not merely match them – a competitor analysis can nonetheless provide vital insight into how your own site could do better.

The five steps to a successful competitor SEO analysis

There are five basic components to an analysis of your rivals’ SEO that will actually provide the information you need about where your competitors are going right or wrong – and by extension, what moves you could make to better challenge them in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

These are (1) determining your critical keyword themes and the sites competing with you for such themes; (2) conducting an organic ranking audit; (3) analysing the top-ranking pages; (4) identifying the elements valued by search engines; and (5) developing a plan to improve on these elements for your own site.

Even a relatively basic analysis can go a long way

As we mentioned above, picking out keywords and competitors is an important part of an effective SEO competitor analysis. If you have a keyword strategy already, this should be a straightforward step – and if you don’t, our team here at Piranha Designs can help to put one together for you.

Some rudimentary keyword research can be carried out through the use of a tool like the free Google Keyword Planner. However, pinpointing your competitors from an SEO standpoint can be a little trickier, as they aren’t always the same as those your marketing team may have in mind. Remember that both large and small ecommerce sites can be SEO rivals of yours, as well as media companies and sites with different business models.

Then, there’s the SEO ranking audit to undertake. You could do this with a dedicated enterprise SEO platform or even just manually with a spreadsheet, documenting how highly various rivals are ranking for certain keywords.

Finally, once you’ve got such invaluable ranking data, you’ll need to start scrutinising and making some conclusions from it. It is at this stage that you will need to dissect the competitor pages that are outranking you, and consider just what is making those pages so special in the eyes of Google.

It could be that certain high-performing competitor pages have more content than yours, or are optimised more effectively for the keyword themes you have identified. Perhaps they’re simply more engaging to read, which makes it more likely that the average reader will remain on that page, instead of simply leaving (‘bouncing’) a few seconds after arrival?

Take your next big step to SEO success with Piranha Designs

We could go into greater detail about how your business could make leaps and bounds online – but of course, we only have so much space here. So why not contact the Piranha Designs team to discuss how we could devise a search engine optimisation strategy that delivers big results for your brand?

While the design of your website will always play a central role in ensuring it ranks well in the search engines, it can be easy to forget just how crucial the most relevant content also is. If your site content isn’t relevant to anyone, you can’t expect to generate many visitors and revenue from natural search.

It’s therefore well worth considering the below strategies for tweaking your site content in a manner that is search engine optimisation (SEO) friendly.

Allow keyword research to guide your content strategy

Keyword research is a key component of all of our SEO and marketing packages here at Piranha Designs, and with good reason. The higher the standard of your keyword research, the more you will know about what searchers truly want.

That’s why keyword research is so vital when you come to devise your natural search and content strategies for your site. Good keyword research enables you to spot the gaps in your site that you need to fill with fresh content.

It’s also important to assign intent to keyword themes – whether the user is looking for information, to make a purchase or to merely navigate relevant sites – so that you can craft the content that will stimulate and fulfil the visitor’s desire in each case.

Make sure you aren’t competing with yourself

Once you have established certain keyword themes, you will be able to map them to specific pages of your site to accommodate the broadest range of relevant keywords.

This greatly helps to ensure you don’t end up simply attempting to optimise every page of your site for a similar set of in-demand keywords, thereby forcing your pages to compete with each other for rankings.

Optimise in both scalable and manual ways

You can efficiently enhance your site’s tag-based content through the use of default ‘formulas’ for generating title tags, meta descriptions, headings and image alt attributes.

However, it’s also true that you can only get so far with your SEO when you depend purely on formulas. In any case, your pages based on the highest-value keyword themes will need to be manually optimised as part of the fine-tuning process.

In a lot of cases, you might simply find yourself needing to fix awkward grammar brought about by the aforementioned formulas. One aspect of your pages that should always be manually optimised, however, is the main body of text, as you can’t apply scalable optimisation methods to what is supposed to be creatively written content.

If your site’s pages aren’t indexed, they don’t have any chance of appearing in natural search results. There are many reasons why your site’s indexation numbers may be on the wane, so let’s have a look at just a few of the most potentially obvious and easily spotted.

Page speed

It may seem logical that when search engine spiders are unable to access a given page at all, they demote that page in the rankings and eventually remove it from the index altogether. However, you may not have known that this can also happen to pages with overly slow loading times.

If enough of your site’s pages have this problem, you may therefore suffer a significant enough drop in indexation numbers for your entire site’s rankings to be affected.

Design changes

If you’ve been tweaking your site’s header and footer navigational structures lately, the resultant impact on categories and pages may mean that entire areas of the site are removed from site-wide navigational elements. With the affected pages receiving fewer internal links as a consequence, search engines may end up demoting their value.

Other design changes can also be problematic for indexation – for example, if they mean the page no longer has as much content or some of its content is included within an image, instead of being readily indexable as plain HTML text.

Duplicate content

There’s no point to a search engine in keeping two or more copies of the same page in its index, so guess what? When the search engine spiders begin to perceive your site as having a lot of duplicate content, your pages aren’t likely to be indexed as much.

Nor is this just a problem for pages that are duplicated exactly, with pages that are merely very similar in their content also vulnerable. This can be a particular issue for ecommerce sites, where browse grids for two subcategories may have largely the same products, meaning the search engine sees little use in indexing both.

Is your own site receiving the close and informed attention that it requires if it is to thrive in the natural search results? Yes, that’s right – as well as web design, Piranha Designs can provide comprehensive search engine marketing services incorporating such vital elements as keyword research, page optimisation, guest blogging, monthly reports and much more.

Is your website secure?

Protect your rankings

Google now adds more weight to sites that are protected by an SSL certificate and use HTTPS on all their pages. So as well as protecting your customers, you will have better search engine results, even if you do not host sensitive data.

SSL Encrypts Sensitive Information

The primary reason why SSL is used is to keep sensitive information sent across the Internet encrypted so that only the intended recipient can understand it.

SSL Provides Authentication

This means you can be sure that you are sending information to the right server and not to an imposter trying to steal your information.

SSL Provides Trust

Web browsers give visual cues, such as a lock icon or a green bar, to make sure visitors know when their connection is secured. This means that they will trust your website more when they see these cues and will be more likely to buy from you. SSL providers will also give you a trust seal that instills more trust in your customers.

How your site displays with SSL

How your site will eventually look without SSL

SSL is required for PCI Compliance

In order to accept credit card information on your website, you must pass certain audits that show that you are complying with the Payment Card Industry (PCI) standards. One of the requirements is properly using an SSL Certificate.

SSL options (packages):

Providing your visitors the security they deserve

Simple SSL

£99/yr

£75 installation fee

Secure https:// browsing

128-256-bit encryption

Browser padlock

No warranty included

Standard SSL

£239/yr

£75 installation fee

Secure https:// browsing

128-256-bit encryption

Browser padlock

£10,000 warranty

Extended SSL

£349/yr

£75 installation fee

Secure https:// browsing

128-256-bit encryption

Browser padlock and green bar

£250,000 warranty

How can we Help your Business succeed online?

Contact us for a free, no-obligation chat about your website or marketing.

The websites I mentioned in the last post that were using incoming links to boost their rankings to the top of google, also knew another secret. This is secret number 3, and this is often over looked even by professionals.

Secret number 3:

You need your best keywords in your link text.

When you link to your site from someone else's the tendency is to do this:

Beautiful high-heel shoes at ABC Company Ltd

Here your company name is the link.

Or this:

For a large range of great high-heel shoes Click Here

This is really bad.

The link text is the text that is highlighted and is actually clickable. It is this text that google will read and check as to the relevance of the page it links to. This also affects the links on your website to your other pages.

The correct way to use these links is to make the keywords linkable.

An example:

Beautiful high-heel shoes

How to buy high-heel shoes

On your website instead of using Click Here, More Information links etc, use the title of whatever it is you are trying to link to.

This simple trick can help your site jump up the rankings and will actually make your site and each page easier to use.

So there you go, 3 little known secrets for getting high rankings in google.

There are a lot more tips and tricks but these are the core secrets you should focus on at the beginning, once these are done you are ready to go to the next level.

The first secret was to do with your title tag, the positioning and density of the keywords within that title tag can greatly affect your ranking. However this second secret has been proven to be the single most powerful tool for high rankings.

A few years ago in the property boom there was fierce competition for keywords such as Spanish Properties, Morocco Properties, etc. Whilst working on some optimisation for an estate agent we came across a phenomenon. A competitor was ranking first on loads of incredibly popular keywords without even having those keywords mentioned on the page. I started looking into this, I checked the source code and did some tricks in google.

What I discovered was this, (secret number two):

High quality links to your website can amazingly boost your rankings

These sites did not have a lot of content, they didn't have many keywords but they did have thousands of sites linking to them. It is these links that make all the difference.

Google has a way of ranking links and their relevance to your site, so a link from a well-ranked website which is relevant to your business has much more authority than your sisters personal website.

An example:

If you are an estate agent and you get a link to your site placed on another estate agent site in Spain, and this site ranks well in Google then that is like a qualified vote for your site.

It is well known that links from popular sites like Delicious, Digg, etc are also valuable.

Links from government and education websites are particularly valuable, especially if they end in .gov or .edu

You can check the links to your site by simply searching in Google using link:www.yourwebsite.com - You can also check your competitors links too!

You can get high quality links by simply contacting the website owners and asking them. The problem is they will want something in return and that is normally a link from your site to theirs. This is no good. Google can see that and will recognise it as a traded link rather than a real recommendation.

In order to get sites to link to yours you need to have good, compelling information or services that people are happy to recommend. Many sites use a free widget, or some unique information or a guide or a white paper. There are many ways to do this and I will go into detail in another email series. You can also pay for someone to submit your links and articles to a large number of websites for you.

We all know that ranking well on Google can completely change your business. Many companies rely on Google for most of their leads and sales. I run a website for one particular client who does no offline marketing at all; all sales come from being well ranked on the search engines.

But this can be incredibly frustrating as you are competing with the whole world, and that sounds daunting...

Many of my clients ask me:

How can I beat my competitor on Google?

What can I do to go up the rankings?

Unfortunately there is no single easy trick that will boost your rankings, but there are some secrets that can definitely improve your rankings and these are easy to implement. It's just a matter of knowing what to do or ask your designer to do.

Ok, let's get into the secrets:

Secret 1

Your title tag is incredibly powerful. You need to know how to use it.

Every page on your website has what is known as a title tag, this is a small tag within the code of the page that tells Google and visitors what this page is about. Imagine if you had to organise the world's data, you need some kind of tagging system, your title tag is the starting point.

So what do I put in my title tag?

This is where the secret lies; most companies will do the following:

* ABC Company Ltd - Shoes and slippers for adults

* ABC Company Ltd - Homepage
* Welcome to ABC Company Ltd

All the above are examples of what NOT to do.

Google spiders will use the first words in your title tag to identify what your website is about. The closer the right keywords are to the start of the title tag the more relevant they are.

If you are selling shoes like the ABC Company above, then your title should be something like:

* Shoes, Slippers, High heels, trainers for adults from ABC Company

However you can still improve on this.

Here are 3 examples of title tags:

1. Gibraltar Accountants at GibAccountants.com

2. Gibraltar Accountants

3. GibAccountants.com - Gibraltar Accountants and Auditors

Which one do you think would rank best for the search "Gibraltar accountants"?

Well it would be number 2. Although all three include the keywords number 2 is more focussed. This means that the keyword density is higher. The more words in the title tag the more diluted the keywords become.

This is great if you know the exact keyword you are optimising for but you can also use variants and different spellings to your advantage:

Gibraltar Accountants - Accountancy in Gib

It is important to have 10 words or less in the title tag, but at the same time, you can use other keywords that help support the main keywords which are at the beginning of the title tag.

So whenever possible ensure the following:

1. each page in your site must have a specific title tag

2. that title tag should be focussed on the keywords

3. the keywords should be first and as undiluted as possible

This little known secret can make a huge difference to your websites rankings and its overall success on Google and the other search engines.

After years of optimising websites and learning the ins and outs, we have released an email series of 3 little know secrets for ranking well in Google and the other search engines. We will now be publishing them on this blog one item per week.

The basic secrets are:

1. The power of the title tag - you need to know how to use it correctly
2. High quality incoming links - links can be a huge deciding factor in your ranking
3. Link text - the actual text you use in your links is extremely important